2013 - July/August
Tackle the Web with Multiple Technologies
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Note: If you recently signed up for a subscription and are now creating a new account, please make sure to use the same email address.
Tackle the Web with Multiple Technologies
“Run your business, not your mail server.” I am not sure where I read that, but it makes so much sense! Every organization is moving to the cloud, and some just haven’t started their journey yet. One of the fastest and most compelling online cloud based offerings is Office 365. Available in various SKUs, you can get SharePoint, Lync, Exchange, and Office professional as cloud-based offerings. The subscriptions are as low as $2 per user per month to $20 something per user per month. Also, with SharePoint 2013, if you buy Office 365 subscriptions for your users, you don’t need to buy CALs (Client Access Licenses) for on-premises use.
If you are like many developers, you are using Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) to provide services to Windows Forms, WPF, Silverlight, ASP.NET and possibly Windows 8 Store applications. Now your boss is asking you to develop some mobile applications using HTML 5 and jQuery. You know you can reuse many of your WCF services, but you are having trouble calling them from jQuery without breaking your existing applications. In this article, I will walk you through the steps for taking a sample WCF service from working just for .NET applications to working with jQuery as well. Don’t worry, your existing applications will still work with the changes you are going to make.
Mastery of mobile platforms makes you a better developer and can really give you more job opportunities. But let’s face it: The list of mobile platforms that offer more healthy prospects doesn’t yet include Windows Phone and Windows 8. Your outlook is just plain better if you can code for iOS or Android.
Although I’m now a huge advocate of test-driven-development, I was not an immediate convert to the school of thought. I understood the necessity of unit testing:
When considering mobile development, you have a variety of techniques to choose from. In many cases, reactive rendering (using CSS media queries) provides a good solution. Additional mobile customization can be achieved by using ASP.NET MVC4 device detection/customization to provide adaptive rendering. Both of these techniques follow the traditional Web development pattern where each page is focused on a specific task. In an application managing a list, there is a page devoted to the list of items, a second page to view details, and perhaps a third to edit a specific item.
Recently, Microsoft released the Visual Studio 2012.2 ASP.NET and Web Tools Refresh and the Visual Studio Update #2. In this article, I will highlight a few of the new and improved features that you will want to consider using right away. Before you can take advantage of these features, you will need to download and install these updates:
For over a decade, many Microsoft database developers have used SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) OLAP to create database cubes for advanced business analytics. SSAS OLAP offers many powerful features, although some developers view the learning curve of OLAP (and its supporting language, MDX) as very steep.
I foresee that in a couple of years pretty much any Web site will be easy to consume from within mainstream devices. I deliberately used the term “mainstream devices” instead of more specific terms like tablets and smartphones just to give a measure of how fluid the situation is.
July/August 2013 Managed Coder Article